Ten years of Crown

Page Tools

Related

A decade has passed since Crown Casino opened its temporary home in the World Trade Centre. Dan Silkstone examines its impact on Melbourne.

In mid-1994, Jeff Kennett was a
well-coiffed whirligig with a
commanding lead in the
opinion polls. He had pinched
the Australian Grand Prix from
Adelaide and was busy planning
a host of major public works.
Victoria's premier was on the move.
But sometimes, on those hectic
Spring Street afternoons, Kennett
would slip quietly away to walk alone
through the palace that was slowly
taking shape on the Yarra's southern
bank.

Kennett had gambled on Crown
Casino; he wanted to see its cards. "I
used to go down there, I'd drop in and
see it being constructed. Just feel it and
taste it," he says. "There was a
wonderful sense of activity."

Today marks 10 years since the
doors opened on Melbourne's first
casino — the cramped temporary
facility at the World Trade Centre that
entertained punters while, across the
river, the permanent casino grew.

From the start, Crown was a
magnet for people and criticism,
attracting more than its share of
money and misery. Some critics
warned of an explosion in problem
gambling, family breakdown and
suicide, while others feared Crown's
size and location would be an
architectural and planning nightmare.

AdvertisementAdvertisement

"There were doomsayers who were
suggesting that Crown would suck the
life out of the city, that retailing and
tourism in the CBD would virtually
disappear, that Crown would
overshadow Southgate and kill the
major suburban shopping centres,"
says Gary O'Neill, Crown's long-time
head of public relations.

Instead, the Melbourne City
Council now says that the casino
attracted new shoppers to the city and
was an important part of the CBD's
rejuvenation during the 1990s. "It has
brought strength and vitality and from
a retail aspect it has been really
exciting," says Councillor Irene
Goonan.

There are two words O'Neill will
never use together. They are "Crown"
and "casino". The way he sells it, Crown
is an entertainment complex, a leisure
precinct, a cornucopia of choices.

"When we opened 10 years ago, it was
a temporary casino with 100 per cent
focus on gaming and gambling. These
days . . . it includes everything from
five-star international hotels, to a new
hotel . . . a series of restaurants plus a
whole gallery of cafes, bistros, retailing
entertainment. It's cinemas and
nightclubs and live music."

More than 15 million people visit
Crown each year and company
research indicates that 60 per cent of
them come to wager. O'Neill says that
some Victorians have accepted Crown
as they have discovered it is about
more than just gambling.

The decor brought a little of brassy Las Vegas to Melbourne.Picture:Craig Abraham

Ask Kennett if Melburnians have
embraced Crown and he fires back
instantly: "Oh yes. It's part of
Melbourne's life now." Kennett
inherited the casino idea from the
Kirner government, but it was during
his time in office that the project was
awarded to the Crown team, headed
by Lloyd Williams and Ron Walker.

Big, bold and brassy, Crown
became symbolic of Kennett and his
time in office. It's not a notion he cares
to dispel. "I saw the redevelopment of
Southbank as being a very good
replacement of what was there —
fundamentally barren industrial land
and deserted factories," he says.

Walker often has cause to reflect on
those early days. As chairman of the
2006 Commonwealth Games team, he
now works from an office in the old
temporary casino. "It was a very
exciting time," he says. "To walk the
floors and see wining and dining like
Melbourne had never seen before,
people from all walks of life . . . Senior
business leaders, church leaders; you
name it, they were there."

Walker says Crown changed
the face of Melbourne
forever, transforming it into a 24-hour,
seven-days-a-week international city.
"(Before Crown) Melbourne was a very
conservative city, very Bostonian . . . it
had six o'clock closing long after the
other states stopped it; there was a
wowserism," he says.

Kennett highlights the project's role
in creating jobs and excitement in
Victoria, as well as revenue for the
State Government. (In 10 years, Crown
has paid $2.5 billion in licence fees,
taxes and government levies.)

"The development of that site has
been without a doubt one of the
reasons why Victoria went from being
a rust basket into being a very vibrant
state," he says.

But the former premier does admit
to one regret, perhaps influenced by
his current job as head of the
depression advocacy group
beyondblue. "Western Australia has
only got poker machines in its casino
and not throughout the community,"
he says. "I'm not sure that that mightn't
be a better model."

These are words to warm an old
adversary. "I would have happily lived
with that," says the Reverend Tim
Costello, one of Kennett's and Crown's
fiercest critics, who points out that WA
has far fewer problem gamblers than
Victoria.

It's clear Costello's opinion of
Crown has not dulled with time. "It
was literally a giant black hole of bad
planning and social normalisation of
something that continues to destroy
marriages, devour savings and cost
lives . . . It has proved to be everything
that I warned," he says.

Gambling researcher Dr James
Doughney says problem gambling as a
social phenomenon simply did not
exist before the Kirner government's
introduction of poker machines in
1992 and the advent of Crown two
years later. "Problem gambling is a
poker machine problem . . . and Crown
has 10 per cent of the pokies in the
state," he says.

Doughney's research at the Victoria
University of Technology suggests that
$2.5 billion is lost on the state's poker
machines each year and that 60 per
cent of the losses are made by 6 per
cent of the population. Often they are
among the state's poorest.

Crown has
been extraordinarily successful at welcoming youngsters into
non-gaming areas, such as its cinemas,
bowling alley and video arcade, a phenomenon that Costello
says normalises the
gambling process by obliquely exposing young people to it. But O'Neill
says Crown has made
efforts to help problem
gamblers, and is the only
casino in the world to
offer a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week counselling
service on its premises.

Like it or not, Crown is entrenched. It's difficult now to imagine the
riverfront without its row of fireball sentries or to picture a Logies night
with a red carpet leading anywhere else.

But the now-familiar design was
considered an underdog by many
during the controversial casino
tendering process. How different
would Melbourne now be if the rival
Sheraton-Leighton bid had
triumphed? That proposal featured a
"poets' walk" as well as something
called a "moveable celestial aureole".

Nobody knows Crown quite like head
architect Roger Poole of firm Bates
Smart. He drew the very first sketch of
the colossal set of buildings and
oversaw the team of 180 architects and
designers. It remains the high point of
his career.

Ask him how Crown has changed
Melbourne and he prefers to talk
about how Melbourne changed the
casino. "We designed it in such a way
that you can engage with all of those
areas without going through the
gaming area. It's quite different to the
Las Vegas model, or any other major
city complex, where to get to your
hotel room you have to go through the
casino."

Poole wanted to create something
that would add sophistication and fun
to the city but would do so in a
distinctively Melbourne way, avoiding
kitschy excess. It also had to last. "We
knew that Melbourne was only going
to get one of these and it had better be
good," he says.

Some initial critics have softened
over time. "I hated the idea that it was
going to be in that location," says
architect and commentator Dimity
Reed. "I thought, 'This will be closed
off, this will be a disaster'. In actual
fact, the city got a very good public
domain out of that building."

Reed believes the riverside
promenade, in particular, has proved a
major architectural achievement that
successfully extends the city along the
Yarra's south bank. "The public spaces
have been extraordinarily well done
and have been a major contribution to
the city of Melbourne."

Not everyone agrees. Professor Kim Dovey is an urban
design specialist from Melbourne University and the author of The Fluid
City: Melbourne's Waterfront Transformation. In May 1993, he wrote to
The Age
expressing
concern that "recent developments on
the South Bank of the Yarra make a
mockery of urban design". Eleven years
later, Dovey still believes that the
casino damaged Melbourne
irrevocably, blocking off South
Melbourne with an imposing edifice
and scuttling plans to open the city to
the bay with a new boulevard allowing
views to Port Melbourne.

He says blocking off the Yarra has
"funnelled" development into a
narrow gap at Queensbridge Square,
the only spot where river access is
available. The result is a competing
cluster of high-rise towers. Dovey lays
responsibility with those who decided
to impose a mega-development on the
riverside, rather than those charged
with designing it. "It's a bad building in
a lot of ways and I don't think they
were mostly the fault of the architects,"
he says.

It's
almost impossible to recall Crown's
genesis without discussing Lloyd
Williams, the man who drove the casino's
construction and ran the complex
until it was bought out by the Packer
family in 1999. Williams was a passionate
but demanding on-site presence,
harrying the design team and
vetting the smallest of details, even
the door handles. This near legendary
micro-management of the
colossal project earned him the
nickname "The Pharaoh".

Walker remembers joining Williams
to inspect work on the glitzy atrium
one weekend. "The next week I walked
in there and the staircase was gone.
He'd decided it was in the wrong spot,
so it came down."

The man who some call "Big Red"
thinks Williams will always be tied to
Crown. "He was the only person who
could have done it . . . Lloyd produced
the goods and the city owes him a
great debt because he did it, much to
the detriment of his own health in
later years," Walker says. "I think it's a
source of enormous sadness that he
still doesn't run it."

Kennett has no doubt that, "on
balance", Crown has made Melbourne
a better place. Even so, he admits he
doesn't feel the same flush of pride
when it comes to the privately funded
casino as he does with public projects
such as the Melbourne Museum, the
Domain tunnel and the Melbourne
Exhibition Centre. "It's a different
feeling in my own heart," he says.

Walker is more enthusiastic,
believing the design has stood up well
over time. "It's a great entertainment
complex the likes of which Australia
has never seen before," he says. Even
Dovey concedes: "These things always
soften over time . . . it has become a
part of Melbourne."

Walker returns to the casino every now and then, usually
to visit its cinemas. Just over a week ago he went along to see the animated
film Shrek 2.
It's a story about an over-sized ogre
who strives for love and acceptance
despite his all-too-obvious flaws —
some might say it is showing in a
fitting location.